Performance evaluation of energy efficient routing with or without relay in medical body sensor network

Abstract

Wearable or implantable sensor based remote health monitoring and support systems are gaining huge popularity because of its accuracy, affordability, mobility support and remote nature. For seamless monitoring, energy efficiency of Medical Body Sensor Network (MBSN) must be high to stretch out network lifetime. For single hop MBSN with STAR topology, sensor nodes send signal directly to the sink node whereas in multi-hop MBSN sensor nodes may act as a forwarder besides data acquisition. This drain out energy of sensor nodes in concern rapidly in case of repeated data forwarding which causes death of node, break of a route or path between sources and sink leading to unsuccessful data transmission. If it is a critical data then it may have life threatening impact on patient. Exclusive forwarder nodes, termed as relay node may be deployed in convenient positions inside the network for intelligent routing which will reduce burden of sensor nodes in terms of energy consumption. Here the nodes considered in the network are divided into different clusters. Relay nodes are placed at the position of cluster heads applying k- means algorithm which analyzes effectiveness of this framework in terms of energy efficiency. Comparison of energy consumptions in three different routing scenarios are considered: through relay node only, direct source to sink without relay node and using shortest path between source to sink irrespective of relay node position. The simulation results show that for varying network configurations in terms of number and position of nodes on human body, scenario of routing with relay nodes only proves to be energy efficient in comparison.